Despite the name of this blog and my interest in farming, I’m not much of a gardener. I’ve had some success, mostly with hearty herbs. But this summer, I finally hit some gardening gold. I had luck with Swiss chard, sunflowers (until the squirrels got them), a bumper crop of tomatoes and our crowning achievement, pumpkins.
The kids started them with seeds at the first Farmers’ Market. They were at the market to help other kids plant, but came home with two biodegradable seed pots of their own.
From those, we watched the pumpkins sprout, then nearly take over our backyard. I had to keep training the vines away from the sidewalk. And man, those plants are have spikes that drew blood more than once when I dared weed without gloves.
Because I wasn’t there when the seeds were planted, there was a time I doubted these guys were pumpkins. They looked more like striped melons. But sure enough, after following some advice to trim back the shoots, the pumpkins grew and turned to orange.
That’s when the war with the squirrels began. I wanted to avoid poisons, so I scattered red chili powder on and around them. That seemed to keep the critters away, except for one whole one that got itself eaten while we were away for a long weekend.
When I felt I couldn’t keep the backyard critters away any longer, I harvested the three surviving pumpkins and brought them inside for protection. There we enjoyed them as fall decorations, until we finally decided to carve two the night before Halloween.
After reading that if you roast your jack-o-lantern within 24 hours of carving it, we decided to give that a try in the VFG test kitchen. Between the carved pumpkin and the other uncarved one, we ended up with more than 6 cups of fresh roasted pumpkin puree.
The puree fed us a deep dish pumpkin pie (recipe ala Alton Brown) and some amazing pumpkin cookies (better second day) with caramel icing.
I was thinking of all this tonight when I pulled the last of the puree from the freezer tonight so we can make more pumpkin cookies this week.
I’m not sure I’ll have luck the second time around, but we’ll try pumpkins from seed again next year too.
Virtual Farmgirl 